 If you don't mind, we're gonna start right away, okay? So, and we're gonna skip the introductions because we don't have time for that. You all have these, they're bios in your handout. We have a lot of experience about American foreign policy in the Middle East on this panel, dating back really decades. Democrats, Republicans, different eras, good times, bad times. And I wanna jump into it. I have a couple of questions and I'm gonna open it up. Before I do, I really wanted to get in on the last panel and I couldn't. So, I wanna say one thing for 30 seconds and then continue the conversation on Twitter, okay? Which is, this whole means objective thing was driving me nuts. Because democracy for me, philosophically, is about aggregating what people want. You guys keep saying what the people want, what the people want, what the people want. How do you know what the people want without democratic institutions? You can talk to your cab driver, the guy on the street, but with all due respect, it's a flawed system, incredibly flawed, including in our own country, but compared to the other ways to know what people want, it seems to me like that's the essence of that debate. And please debate me at McFall on Twitter afterwards, not today, not right now. So now we're gonna turn to American foreign policy in the region and what we've been talking about throughout this conference. And I'm gonna ask a kind of normative question, a historical question, and we have time prescriptive, but to be honest, I'm less interested in prescriptive. I know we're in Washington and that may be more germane to now, but I really think that's kind of learning some basic things about what we've done right, what we've done wrong is important to understanding the right way to be prescriptive. So I wanna start with, these are gonna be big, hard questions, okay? Just so the crowd knows, I did not circulate these questions before, even though I was told to do so. So if I were writing a speech, and in fact, I've been involved on some speeches about the Middle East in 2009, I was, and in 2011, I was with President Obama, we would most certainly have in the talking points why the United States believes it's, we wanna promote security, prosperity, and governance in the Middle East and North Africa. That's a banal, obvious thing to say that if you were giving a public speech as a U.S. governor official, you would say. But I want you all to dig hard for us and tell us what you think are or should be, or should have been, depending on where you wanna take up the story. What are objectives, goals, outcomes that the United States, the United States government should seek to achieve in the Middle East and the MENA region more generally? Elliot, let's start with you. Peace and prosperity, chicken and every pot. I mean, I don't know how one can answer that. Middle East, in that sense, is not different from any other area. You wanna advance our national interests. Our national interests include the security of the United States from terrorism, among other things. The prosperity of the United States meaning creating partners access to important commodities such as oil. And we also have, I would argue, we feel we are better off in a world in which democracy seems to be advancing rather than one in which it seems to be declining. What's the priorities among those three? If you have to write a paper and say, this is what we really care about, this is secondary, this is tertiary, would you make a statement about that? No, I wouldn't because I don't think that that's actually what faces you as a policymaker. What faces you really is, I think, there are immediate things and longer-term things. There is nothing that you can do on Monday that will make Egypt a democracy that day. There may be something that you need to do on the security side. There might just be. I think the argument tends to be that the more concrete interests or those that are seen to be concrete by the Department of Defense, USTR, or the Department of Commerce, have a tendency to be the ones that are viewed as no longer than we can deal with it next week or next year or in co-aid. I want to come back to the trust, but Michelle, what would be your answer to that? Well, look, I think that the goals that Elliot said are right. I mean, there's also sort of a more modest and a more negative, but a way of looking at it which is simply mitigating threats, emanating from the Middle East. And I really think that's where US policy has been for some time now. Now, of course, you can't achieve that maybe without helping to foster more positive outcomes in that Nancy O'Gail in an earlier panel talked about the US just having a containment strategy and not having failed. And I think she's right about that, but I do think that's where we've been for some time. The other problem with these goals and with prioritizing them, I do think it's in a way wrong to prioritize them because they're interlinked. Right, so getting peace and stability that's without any kind of prosperity or just distribution of the economic goods within countries and so forth. It's just not achievable. And I think it has led to a lot of the kind of thinking, Elliot, you were talking about short-term, long-term. I really think in discussing these issues, long-term should be banished from our vocabulary. To me, in Washington and in a policy environment, long-term equals not gonna do it, period. You know what I'm saying, it's not important, it's something that I need to kind of salute, but really we're not gonna worry about that. But they do come in conflict with each other, let's be blunt, those different goals. Do we support democracy in Bahrain or do we keep the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain in 2011? I sat there and listened, that's a concrete question that people had priorities on. So how do you answer that question? I think that becomes a question of, what does the United States supporting democracy in Bahrain means? To quote Nancy O'Gale again, she said something along the lines of sometimes the United States overstating its influence. I don't think the United States supporting democracy or democratization in Bahrain means the United States has to make that happen in Bahrain. Let's face it, it's extremely difficult to make something happen in somebody else's country. So what the US supporting it means, okay, now we can unpack that, what does it mean for the US to be clearly in favor of that kind of an outcome to signal that and to maybe try to avoid doing things that would block democratic outcomes. So that's what I think we need to think about. I actually don't think those goals are in direct conflict. I disagree, but I'm gonna come back to it. At least in my historical experience, they seemed like they were in tension. Unless you use the word that you're not allowing us to this short-term, long-term. But let's come back to that when we talk about the historic examples. Jake, what's your answer? I'll pick up on this Bahrain issue because I think I'm closer to what Michelle is than where you appear to be on this question of how much they're in conflict. It really depends on what the proposition actually is. If the proposition is the United States is going to place the advancement of democracy in Bahrain as a paramount national interest that can be easily disproven by what we actually do. If the United States looks to advance democracy everywhere all the time, I can give you a thousand examples of what not to. In that sense, there's a conflict between our security and prosperity values interests and this kind of values-based agenda. However, if the proposition is more modest but still somewhat revolutionary, which is that amidst all of the interests we have, one of them is actually we're not neutral on the human condition and we do care about advancing that of values and principles elsewhere to the extent we can in the context we can. And it's one of many. That I think is not in tension with also looking out for security interests in Bahrain. Is it true that we had to tread more carefully with how we dealt with the king of Bahrain during 2011, 2012 because of the Fifth Fleet and the Saudis and the Libya intervention and so forth? Yes, I mean we were both there for that. On the other hand, did we still from Jim Mattis on down push an agenda, a reform agenda in Bahrain as an important part of our national security? We did. And so I just think a big part of this has to be about having more candor and humility about where exactly democracy fits into the US national agenda. And the place I guess I would disagree with Michelle a little bit is I totally agree that long-term means we don't do it. But my solution to that is not actually to ban the phrase long-term. It's to really inquire, can a country that makes foreign policy, which changes in administration with all kinds of political pressures with global demands ever actually come up with a long-term strategy that it can implement? I think that is the single biggest question facing the United States on this issue of governance because even where this stuff doesn't come in conflict we're bad at it because we don't stick with it. And for me, I think grappling hard with that question is probably the single biggest thing I took away from my time in government and it doesn't just relate to the democracy, human rights agenda, it relates almost across the board. So related to that, this is still at the normative and too historical and if we have time we'll talk about prescription. Elliot, in your answer I'm glad you phrased it that way. You pivoted in your first answer to our security and our prosperity and I would agree with that. Is it always win-win in the interaction with our partners in the Middle East? So enhancing our security enhances theirs and our prosperity enhances their prosperity or in your experience in governments and maybe we should mix it up. Michelle, we'll go with you first and then we'll work back this way just to warn you. Or are there times when it is zero stuff that what's good for us is not necessarily good for our partners and I'm using partners abstractly so that you can define that any way you want. It's easy to talk about it vis-a-vis our enemies. Vis-a-vis our partners or collaborators or allies because we have allies too. Is it always win-win or in your experience is it some time in tension? Our interest versus theirs. Okay, well so I'm glad you started sort of problematizing partners because that's exactly where I was gonna go with it. So this is one thing that I have to say drove me crazy when I was in government and people would say to me, Egypt wants this or Saudi Arabia wants that and I said, who are you talking about? I mean, so the problem is when you're in the US government you're talking about our partner or our ally. So you're talking about the government of that country and even of course we can who in the government and so forth, it's really problematic but there's the problem is that in these countries as we've seen a tremendous gulf has developed generally between governments and citizens and sometimes between other institutions of the government, right? We've talked earlier about parliaments, judiciaries or whatever that there are some real tensions. Very often I have found when I was in US government that people would really be thinking of it as the head of state or maybe the foreign minister. And so that gets to your question, right? So the problem is that very often when we're talking about things like security and prosperity, if your partner is a head of government then perhaps he is defining his security as his staying in power. That's what it's all about and his whole security relationship with you is about him staying in power whereas we've heard today the way security might be defined more broadly among citizens and so forth would be something else, certainly economic prosperity or would be defined very differently. So I think that's where the United States often gets caught is by defining these things so narrowly by depending on your government interlocutor. And very unfortunately we've sort of lost contact and I think particularly in the current administration with the whole idea of the United States whether we're talking about our government, our civil society and so forth reaching out to other societies and somehow communicating with other civil societies with other societies and not just on a government to government basis. All right, I agree with that but I don't think that's a new problem. My criticism of Obama-Iran policy was that the president was dealing with the government and forgetting about the people of Iran. Now why was he doing that? Well, you can't negotiate a nuclear deal with the people of Iran, you can't negotiate with the government. Nevertheless, it meant that when the people spoke in 2009, we did not want to hear from them, they were in the way of doing the deal. So it's not new, it happens a lot. I think the problem you're pointing out, I would say, is partly because we're a global power and very few people are. So it may be that somebody wants us to do something in the Middle East that will interfere with something else we want with Russia or China, for example. So from the point of view of that individual country, you know what we're doing is not helpful but we have more fish to fry, we have a broader view and I guess our argument would be, well, in the long run, this will come out in the wash. In other cases, I think we need to distinguish though, this gets us back to the brain a little bit bad. Mike, who's doing it? Am I doing that? I don't know, here do us this. Anyway, one question here is what is the American policy? What are we trying to do? Do we care about the democracy and Bahrain and so forth? There's another question though, which is sometimes we fail. We fail either because- I'm getting the failures, by the way. It's true, we fail because it's too hard. As Michelle said, to use foreign policy movements to change a country's internal structures is very hard. Otherwise, we just don't do it right. I mean, I wonder, for example, if we had pushed a lot harder earlier, could we have helped bring about, could we have brought about better outcome in Bahrain? Could we have muscled the king through and with the Saudis and Emirati? There was a moment when it looked as if the Saudis were saying, I mean, they did say whether they meant it was a different question. You know, a Shia prime minister in Bahrain, under the king, that'd be okay if it would keep the peace. So maybe we just, you know, maybe we just didn't do it right. But that does not mean that the administration didn't care or didn't want the outcome of democracy and human rights in Bahrain. Maybe it was too hard, maybe we didn't do it right. But the goal was there. Right. Jake, do you wanna get in on this or can I go to my next question? Go to your next question. Okay, I'm a good student. So I wanna talk some history. So we talked about objectives. Now I wanna talk about strategy. Okay, it's easy to have great goals. It's hard to develop strategies to achieve them. And we'll go back this way, starting with Jake and go down the line. Can you, and ideally it would be a strategy that you were personally involved in in the government because then it's more real for our audience. But you can pick anyone if you want historically. Give us a great example. And part of this is my academic hat now because we're trying to teach American foreign policy. We're trying to teach it through the case study method. We find like having abstract conversations about interests and strategy, hard way to teach. So let's like get into real things that happen. Give us an instance from your time in government. An example of a concrete strategy or policy that helped us achieve one of those desired objectives that you talked about in the beginning. Very concrete. We had a goal. Here's our strategy. We achieved it. It's a win. Okay. I was gonna use the Iran nuclear deal. Yeah, go for it. I thought you were gonna use the Iran nuclear deal. Friends are the deals. You're sitting around here. That's a good one. Go for it. I have to first of all disagree with Elliot's characterization of how things went down in 2009. I mean, I think there was a fair amount of 90 to 10 in our part about what was actually happening in Iran. A calculation that in fact, robust statements by the American president or senior American officials would have hurt more than helped the Green Revolution. That may have been right or wrong, but the conversations I was involved in and Mike was there too were not, hey, we better quiet this all down so that we get the nuclear deal. But basically, President Obama did set out to build a campaign of pressure that would create enough incentive for Iran to come to the table so that we could put a lid on the nuclear program. Multifaceted campaign that involved combination of sanctions, intelligence-led operations, forced posture in the region, and an overall valence of trying to make Iran the bad guy in the US the good guy, which had its own sort of diplomatic choreography to it. And he created the circumstances the president did through that multifaceted strategy to get to the Iranian Institute and produce the outcome. And he did it by building really a global coalition of actors on this. Now, people can quarrel with whether his conversion of all of that pressure and isolation into the deal itself, that he got the maximum out of that, that he produced exactly the deal that people would have hoped for, but you've got to say as a systematic application of means to a defined objective, it was a pretty linear, pretty effective, multi-year, multi-dimensional campaign that produced a demonstrable, tangible result. And as we sit here today, we are not talking about Iran putting a miniaturized nuclear device on top of an ICBM the way we are talking about some other countries doing so. I'll reign for you though. Do you want to stay in the Middle East? Sorry? You want to stay in the Middle East? I kind of did, because that's a theme of the conference, but no, actually, it gets related to our topic. In, there are other examples of democratization. There are plenty of American efforts, but... And it doesn't have to be about democracy, by the way. Well, but let's stay with that. I'd say the aftermath of 9-11, the Bush administration concluded that the way in which Mubarak was ruling Egypt had to change and had to change in the direction of a more open political system. And so we had, we came up with a few very specific goals. For example, Mubarak had never run for election. He was elected by the parliament. We wanted to change in the constitution so that he would have to present himself as a candidate and there would be at least one other candidate in the 2005 election. And that took a range of pressures. Some public, some private. The public included, for example, a speech by Condi Rice at American University, Cairo. It took a lot of private pressure and badgering. It annoyed the hell out of Mubarak, but he did it in the end. Was it, it was not a fair election, but here's long-term planning. Our view was, if you could have an election in 2005 with another candidate, there's no possible way it was gonna be a fair and free election. But you'd have created a precedent for having an election. And in 2010, we'd be gone. But there'd be another American government that would want human rights and democracy in Egypt that could use that and push forward and say, well, okay, it's obvious there's gonna be election and there are gonna be other candidates. What do we do now to make it a freer, better election? So over time, you'd be moving in that direction. And if you talk to people in the Egyptian press, if you talk to people in Muslim Brotherhood, they will, I think, say that in 2004 and 2005, the political space opened. So in that limited way, it was a successful policy for a few years. Good, let's go. Well, Elliot sort of stole mine. Oh, I think. I'll actually mention two briefly. Another one is related to Egypt, and it's a little bit before that, Elliot, if you'll recall. So there was this human rights case, right? This Egyptian-American professor, Saddidine Ibrahim, who at the time was the leading light of liberal civil society in Egypt. And the, but he had transgressed the limits of kind of making fun of the Mubarak's, and particularly of the idea of Gamal Mubarak's succeeding his father. And the Egyptian government went after him with everything, right? The U.S. government started pressing this case privately. I happened to be the political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo at the time. I attended all of his trial. I had to be there all the time to show that the United States cared about this. He was an American citizen after all, in addition to a leading figure of civil society. And the United States kept being reassured behind the scenes. Don't worry, it's all gonna be okay. End of the day, he sentenced to seven years in prison for allegedly for embezzling funds from the EU, as well as for besmirching the reputation of Egypt in his civil society work. So it was an explicitly political case. So anyway, at that point I was at the NSC, and there was this issue after 9-11 of giving supplemental economic assistance to Israel and to Egypt because of what their economy suffered after 9-11, whatever. We were supposed to give the Egyptians $133 million in supplemental economic assistance. And after Saddidine Ibrahim was convicted and sent to prison without really a chance of appeal, the president decided to cancel that. And just told Mubarak, wrote to him and said, you know, that $133 million we talked about, you're not getting it. And it's because of this case and so forth. There was a furious reaction from the Egyptian state in the Egyptian media. The whole thing was made public and so forth. And everyone was told what a terrible mistake this was and everything. Very quietly, six months later, Saddidine Ibrahim was allowed to go to a higher court and was completely exonerated of all charges, right? And the Egyptians always told us this had nothing to do with your cutting that assistance, right? But what was interesting about it was it wasn't leverage. It was just a cost. It wasn't like we're gonna withhold this and it was like, no, we've dealt with you on this case for three years now. We've gotten nowhere and there's a price for that and here it is. So, it's interesting because now the current administration is doing something that sort of combines those two approaches with Egypt right now with actually just cutting some assistance as kind of like a price. And then withholding some others, you know, some other assistance with some conditions. So, look, you know, that's a very small thing but it was an interesting experiment, you know? And the whole thing that conditionality never works and assistance can never be used for these things or whatever. Now, I think it's very difficult to do it the right way and it very often backfires. And as Elliot mentioned with Bahrain and other places, it very often doesn't succeed. But it makes a statement and to be honest with you, I think on this whole issue, whether it's human rights, democracy, governance, et cetera, very often, you know, it's just a matter of the United States making clear where it stands. That has so many implications for us just to make clear where we stand on the issue. That doesn't mean we can make it happen in our country, X. But there's a value to our making it clear. Look, this is what we stand for. Make it clear to the government, make it clear to the public. And as I said, it's not necessarily a failure if we don't make it happen. It is a failure, however. If we say this is where we stand on this issue and we continue to do things that directly contradict that. That's where the United States has got to look itself in the mirror. Let's get to those. Although SOD now supports the CC's regime, right? So, you know, we all know SOD in his meandering ways. But we'll hope he'll come back. Not to America, but to a different normative view. So let's talk about failure. And I want to be very precise about it. I want to talk grandiose-ly. I want to talk about it in precisely the way the three of you just did, which I thought was quite instructive. And we're gonna come back to you because we want to write these up as case studies. But now I want an example of the failed strategy, right? So the goal is stated. Everybody agrees that this is the goal that your government, whenever you were in government at the time, seeks to achieve. And then a strategy is chosen that does not achieve its objective. And Elliot raised a very important point that I wanted to raise. Sometimes that's because it was the wrong strategy to achieve that objective. And sometimes, in my view, just thinking generally about American foreign policy, it might have been the right strategy given all the other choices at the time, but it's overwhelmed by factors that of course the United States doesn't control, right? So I use sports analogies when I talk about this. You can have the most, I used to coach third grade basketball. You can have the most brilliant strategy for scoring two points. But you're constrained aid by your team, but also by the team you're playing. And no matter what the brilliant strategy was, it's going to fail. And I can think of the instances when I was in the government. So let's talk about that in the Middle East. And I want to be clear. This can be about security, prosperity or governance. We've been speaking about governance, but I'm curious of that disconnect between strategy and goals that therefore led to outcomes that did not serve American national interests. Anybody can start, because this is the failure list. Well, let me stay with Egypt and follow on with this, what I would do as a successor to that would be on the spot. We have the same view in the Bush administration of Egypt in 2006, seven, eight, that is it needed to move toward reform. We had the view that Gamal should not run for president. We had the view that this would be really terrible and disruptive for all the obvious reasons. He'd never served in military, military, like him. This kind of fake dynasties, as we saw in some other Arab country, were a terrible practice. We failed to, first of all, to dissuade Mubarak. You never quite know what he was thinking, but he certainly never said, at that time or later, this will never happen, my sons will never, he never did that, he never disavowed it. And after the kind of opening of 2004 to five, things went downhill in the last couple of years of the Bush administration in terms of human rights and democracy in Egypt. So our effort to keep that ball rolling in the right direction failed. Why did it fail? There are a lot of theories of this. One theory is that after the Hamas victory in the January 2006 parliamentary elections in Palestine, the administration formed a view that elections were no damn good and we shouldn't have any, forget that democracy stuff. I disagree with that completely, I think it's nonsense. There is a view that it just wasn't important enough to us in the sense that we wanted it, but there were some other things we wanted. We wanted Mubarak's help in the 2007, 2008 Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. There were a dandy in 2004 or five, not seriously, but there was at an apple is an after. It was a real effort by Secretary Rice, primarily, and she thought, as always, you need the Egyptians and Jordanians to help, particularly Mubarak, who had always done this for decades, so you can't do that while you're pounding on his head and screaming at him. And so the pressure, I actually believe that is a good part of it. Another part of it is he had to weigh a lot of things in his, he had to make some calculations. He may have thought, you know, having, okay, I have a phony election and let I'm a new run against you and then I can put him in prison, I can do that. But what the Americans are asking now, a more serious political opening, too dangerous, saying that Gamal won't run, probably would have created a bit of problem with his wife, who wanted Gamal to run because she wanted Gamal to protect the family after her 80-year-old husband was gone. Not crazy. So, the Russian family, the Yeltsin family did something similar. So the policy failed, just one anecdote. We actually tried to have a conversation with Mubarak when he visited the ranch in 2004 in Texas. And we had an elaborate plan. It was obvious that he wouldn't have a discussion of any of these things with all of his retainers around, various ministers. So we figured out- I like that word, I've never heard that word before. Well, it was, you know, it was a royal court. So the way we did it was Mubarak flew by helicopter from the hotel in Waco to the ranch with Gamal, but all the others went by bus and limo. So it took them, you know, an hour, it took him five minutes. So we had close to an hour with Mubarak and Gamal alone and the president let off with a question. He didn't want to say, yeah, well, what's, you know, what's gonna happen in Egypt when you're dead? That didn't seem very diplomatic. So the question was framed in a sort of, you have an extraordinarily young country. Average age is whatever it was that year 30. You have X million people in school. As you think about the future, as you think about the kind of Egypt, we had talked this through. And Mubarak, who was no fool, instantly saw what was being asked of him and said, you're right, it's a very young country. We have 10 million, 50 million, whatever it is, children in school, we've thought a lot about this. Gamal, tell him about the educational reforms. That was the end of that. I mean, it was obvious that he absolutely refused to have that discussion. Anyway, the policy did not succeed. And, you know, Egypt proceeded what now looks like on a straight path to Rear Square. Think? You know, I was trying to think, I think, and I'm gonna go with the Libya case post-Qaddafi. The reason I was struggling with answering this question is because so many instances in the aftermath of the Prang, the revolutions of 2011, we just ended up in neither fish nor fowl situations, where in a way, we were sort of paralyzed by the difficult choices faced with us. And so, it's a little hard to say we were executing a strategy with great conviction and it either succeeded or failed. I would say that was true in Syria, it was true in Egypt, and it was true with respect to, you know, our efforts to nudge along political reform in the Gulf, where it was almost like a recurring pathology of U.S. foreign policy that we lean forward a little because we kind of know the direction we wanna go, but then as soon as we feel the costs of that, we back off a bit and never really give the strategy, so to speak, its full opportunity to actually work. So that I think is our biggest kind of recurring challenge, it's not just in the Middle East, it's elsewhere too. But Libya, the standard line is that Qaddafi died and then we all just kind of went home and quit on the whole thing. I don't think that that's a fair characterization. We had a strategy and the strategy involved putting Europeans in the lead, particularly the Italians and the French and others on some of the political and governance issues, working to free up the immense Libyan assets that were available to basically carry forward the job of DDR and reintegration of militias and the like and getting some kind of security force on the ground that could provide a baseline level of stability in the country. And I think basically the reason that didn't succeed started with number one, the Libyan said we are not going to allow any foreign boots on the ground under UN mandate otherwise. And so there was no baseline of security in Libya and we would sit in the sit room and talk about how we could train at various European bases from scratch, a sectarian free, tribal free, Libyan force, birth it almost like a macular concept, but it was just kind of crazy. But there's nothing, that was just a hard problem we were up against. And frankly, that when you're dealing with these more diffuse kinds of issues, what it takes to do the diplomatic jaw boning, what it takes to actually carry through a financial strategy that can produce the kind of political outcomes you're seeking, it requires so much effort from the top. And frankly, neither the Americans or the Europeans put in quite the level of effort that was required. And then that result was the slow and then ultimately rapid deterioration in the situation. So. So I wanna reach a little further back for this case, but I think the implications of this one are still very much with us today. And it is about governance and it's about Palestine. I tend to agree with what Mudarkasee said in an earlier panel about, there was something very, something special about Palestinian society that really prepared them well, I think, for democratic practices, certain pluralism and so forth. And so I think at the time following the Oslo Accords and so forth, I think the US government started out well with promoting the development or supporting, I should say, the development of democratic institutions for Palestinians with the idea that hopefully through a negotiating process they're gonna have their own state and it would be a democratic state and so forth. So in the beginning, the Palestinian legislative council elections and so forth. And I think Palestinians, we're doing well and we're well prepared for this actually. And the Palestinians have run some very good elections and so forth, I mean procedurally and as a society and so forth. But of course, then we reached the calamity of the 2006 and then 2007, the limited Palestinian civil war, the rift between Gaza and the West Bank, between Hamas and the PLO. And the United States was right in the middle of that. So it seems to me, I wanna get a comment from Elliot on this, but after, I don't wanna run the panel, but I mean, you know, but it seems to me that there are a couple of points where the United States made crucial mistakes, right? So some people think the United States made a mistake by sort of going along with Hamas participating in those elections, which it had boycotted earlier elections. Now it wanted to participate and what the terms of that were. Should the terms of that have been somehow agreed upon, the terms under which Hamas would participate and specifically its relationship to the peace accords. And what the Palestinian authority relationship to Israel would be and so forth. Because of course it's always a terrible, terrible mistake to go into elections thinking you know what the outcome will be. Correct. Right? And so the outcome was what it was. And then I personally think that we choked, that the United States choked on the outcome of those Palestinian elections on the victory of Hamas. And this is where I think what Jake just said about Libya applies, that we lean forward but then we back off when we see what it really means and we don't give the strategy a chance to work. You know, I personally think there would have been a better way to handle, there probably was a better way of constructing the conditions for those elections but even if we didn't, there was a better way I think to handle the outcome of those elections so that it would not have brought about what I think has been a terrible calamity for Palestinians, for the prospect of negotiated solution. I mean it's totally killed political life in Palestine. And there are many other sides of that. Of course the fact that the negotiations failed and so forth and so on. But this is one thing, so I think it was an epic fail. And partly on the part of the United States. Want to jump in on this or move to the next question? Well this is really Palestinian stuff, I blame Bill Burns. Yes, even though he was in Moscow, doesn't matter. That's the next panel. Only one comment, when the election was held and Hamas won, is an interesting thing. How does government work? Unexpectedly, the lawyers came to us, primarily from the Treasury Department and they said, now you understand that you cannot give one cent to the Palestinian government anymore because it's a parliamentary system, the parliament is in charge, the parliament is under control of a terrorist group called Hamas. All the ministers report to parliament. So anyone who gives money to this government goes to jail for supporting terrorism. Which rather constrained our options. And we tried to work around it and we said, well the president doesn't work for far. But it's an interesting case study because none of us had thought about that for a second. And all of a sudden, a completely unexpected factor emerges that doesn't come from the NSE, doesn't come from the State Department, doesn't come from DOD, who's the Treasury Department lawyer? Government is complicated. Okay, I know we need to go to questions but I don't quite wanna go there yet. I have two more questions but I'm only gonna really ask one, okay? So the one I'm not gonna ask that I'm sure is gonna come up is given these lessons of history, what do you recommend for the new administration? But I'm not interested as much in that one as my last question. Which is, again, thinking about strategy and policy and the connection between goals and outcomes. Can any of you think of when you were in government examples of good outcomes for the United States in the Middle East, on those three big buckets that we've been talking about all day that occurred independently of American foreign policy? Tunisia comes to mind right away from our conversation last night. So that's too easy. But maybe, no, but I'm interested in your view of this and this gets to the question of our agency in a region that maybe we don't have as much agency as we do. And when you ask it of different regions, it's a lot easier to answer this question. I can see you all thinking, Jake, anything come to mind? Hard for me to, it's hard for me to come up with a clear example of something good that is happening. Well, a good outcome for the United States where there has been a Middle East where we did not have a strategy to achieve it. It's almost always the reverse. Well, yeah, that's kind of, I mean, your silence is. Okay, no, let me give, in the era of us withdrawing and we don't have any, you know, it's kind of interesting maybe. Here's one, after the Arab Spring, 2012, let's say, the immediate reaction of the government of Morocco, it has changed now. The immediate reaction is to promulgate a new constitution which is somewhat more democratic. We had nothing to do with that. Or I would say the decision on the part of the government of the Emirates to modernize the country. This is Abu Dhabi, this is Dubai, not politically, but certainly it's an extraordinary economic modernization that nothing to do with that. That's good for us, just to be there. Right, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, there's tactical stuff that happens all the time. I mean, arguably, for example, the kind of behind the scenes, rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries on one hand and Israel, on the other hand, is good for the United States or good for our interest, you know, to have different allies of the United States who at the moment are working together. And maybe we inadvertently, you know, push them together, you know, in some ways. So, I mean, there certainly are things like that that happen. I tend to agree, though, that whether we're talking about uprising in Tunisia and the outcome of that or the kind of things Elliot mentioned, that these things, in a way, are more meaningful. Right, these are not just elite power play things like what's going on now, I think, between the Israelis and the Gulf countries because we don't see that these things that come bottom up out of the societies are, you know, they're probably more profound and more enduring. Right, so I also wanted to ask you about the rise of other powers and their influence on our objectives in the Middle East, but we've run out of time for me to ask too many questions. So let's go to the floor and I see last first. And yeah, right here, right there. And introduce yourself and then we can take a few just first questions and then we'll gather a bunch at the end. Less Campbell, NDI. And just a comment for Elliot, just probably because of time he left out one thing in Egypt very important, 2005. His part of the strategy was the first time that the US government gave grants directly without having a veto by the US by the Egyptian government through USAID directly to Egyptian civil society organizations in 2005. Most of those grants were to organizations including Ibn Haldun Center, Saudi and Ibrahim Center to do domestic election monitoring, which they did. It was first time they were allowed to do a domestic election monitoring in 2005. And so the election not only had Aiman Nour, it had proof through a, you know, quite a broad effort that the turnout rather than being 99 or 97 or whatever they claimed all the time was in the probably maybe single digits, but the government agreed that it was 25% and I'd argue that the emperor no longer had any close at that stage. But just a question for Jake on Yemen, which was a big feature of a previous session. It's hard to see the strategy on Yemen exactly. It looked like the strategy was to allow Saudi Arabia to take the lead on the military aspect and then to allow, you know, what's turned out to be kind of a feckless UN process to kind of go in the political route. I'm just wondering if you could make any comments on what you thought the strategy on Yemen was. I mean, we see that it's not working, but I'm hoping it wasn't what it appears to be. So, well, I think there has been a change in the strategy to a certain extent, a much more permissive environment for the Saudi Emirati operation and with basically a single-minded focus on AQ. I think that's the current strategy. It's almost like the rest of it, even the Iran aspect is taking a huge backseat to the administration's overriding focus on the current administration's overriding focus on trying to neutralize or suppress the terrorist threat there. In the Obama administration, frankly, there was not through Jerry Feierstein who was the ambassador as the Arab Spring got underway. There was actually a really concerted effort on the part of the US government to work with the Gulf countries on this transition, on a national dialogue, on everything that kind of looked good for a little while. And then basically I think in part because we didn't fully understand the dynamics of it. Free, we didn't fully understand, for example, Saleh's role, we didn't fully understand Iran's influence with the Houthis. This was a country that we just didn't have, I think, the kind of ground-level understanding of the dynamics who allow us to feel like we could stay one step ahead or at least a breast of events. So we became constantly behind, behind developments on the ground. And then I think basically surprised by what the Saudis did. And once the Saudis did what they did, the Obama administration was deeply troubled by it, didn't want to support it. It ended up becoming a flashpoint in the relationship between the US and Saudi. But yet at the same time was not in a position to shut it down. And so in a way, we essentially let the entire drift of events in Yemen get away from any positive American agency where we were driving either a diplomatic or a security strategy. And I think the single biggest reason for that was not the lack of trying our attention at the outset. It was a lot of things breaking against us, but also, with a certain extent, our lack of understanding of the storm clouds on the horizon and our inability to get prepared for them so that we could, for example, manage the Saudi fear or bolster Hadi in certain ways. So I think what you saw is basically what you get and there was not, in my view, a clear and effective thought of how the US was going to shape events rather than just simply respond to them along the way. Yeah, here? Just one quick comment. Maybe the second president named George Bush wasn't the person to convince Hosni Mubarak not to name his son the next president of Egypt. We had an election in which they did. Now my question for the panel is about the value of rhetoric in all of this and I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean that in a positive way. In other words, why not say these are the things? I have a sense that a lot of times in American foreign policy we publicly weigh the pros and cons of all these things instead of just saying we stand for these things. For example, we're always going to be for security. We're always going to be against terrorism. We don't need to talk about it all the time. We're going to be for those things in our foreign policy. So what's wrong with talking about democracy and human rights when everybody knows, of course, that we are going to be concentrating on our security concerns at the same time? And I would argue, contrary to what you all said, that Tunisia is an example of that in the sense that while it was not a high level thing, I haven't served in Tunisia at the time, it was very clearly our policy on the ground to support democracy and young rights in Tunisia. That was a stated unclassified policy of the United States of America that what we were going to do was going to be to find ways to stand with those in Tunisia who stood for democracy and human rights. Now, the ultimate result, of course, is the work of the Tunisian people, and they deserve the credit for that. But that was an example, I think. Everybody knew we were going to work on terrorism with the Tunisian government, but there was nothing wrong at the same time with saying, hey, you know what? We're going to work on terrorism, but we really, really believe in democracy, and we really encourage a movement in that direction on the part of the Tunisian government and political forces. Ambassador, do you want to get in on this, sir? We have the former ambassador from Tunisia sitting right here. OK, all right. Go ahead. I do have a question, which is a totally different subject, and it's more for Jake, I think. And it's Syria, which hasn't come up so far in this discussion. And basically, your question, did we have the right strategy? Did it not work because strategy was wrong, or was it factors beyond our control? Or Elliot may want to talk about Syria also from the Bush administration period. We need to talk about Syria. Thanks for bringing it up. Syria, having thought a lot about this, watch the horrors continue to unfold. The fundamental challenge, and maybe this happens frequently, I don't know, that the people advocating for greater means on the part of the United States to address the situation in Syria were also the ones who were arguing for more maximalist ends. They were the ones who were saying, no, Assad must go. No, we must support the opposition. We need the democratic transition. Those who were arguing for less means were the same people who were also arguing for less ambitious outcomes. And fundamentally, our problem in Syria was that there was no one seeking to close the ends means gap from both sides, both increasing the means and reducing the ends so that we could present to the president a credible strategy that could actually succeed. So what he kept hearing from those of us who were advocating for more was you're asking the United States to do more, but achieve something I don't think we can achieve. So I believe that if earlier on in the conflict we had chosen to take a more assertive posture towards Syria while also having a more realistic set of benchmarks for what we felt we could achieve over time, may have had a different policy-making process, may have. In any event, even if we didn't have a different policy-making process, that would have been a better approach by the United States. I think we really got ourselves caught up in the gap between stated objectives and the means we were. Ladies and gentlemen, Michelle, do you want to weigh in? I think people would be curious to hear your views. Yeah, just let me add a comment on that. I think that is an interesting perspective. I mean, look, so in Syria, you had a couple of external powers, Iran and Russia, who wanted to preserve the regime in place. So preserving something that's already there while difficult is always going to be easier than trying to support a theoretical alternative or an opposition that is trying to form itself into an alternative. So admittedly, it was a harder thing to do. And I think that's, in a way, what you're getting at, that you couldn't come up with what exactly you could do. That being said, again, I think there was a moment there, especially 2012, 2013, when there were a lot of defections taking place from the Syrian army and the regime and so forth, and before Daesh really became a factor. And again, I do think there was a moment that was missed when you could have acted, and it would have been probably a better outcome. People talk about Libya and sometimes where there was an intervention, and as you say, maybe a very perfect follow-up and so forth. But I often ask people, would you rather be a Syrian or a Libyan right now? I mean, which one of those countries do you think has a better chance of reaching a peaceful outcome? And I do think it is Libya, because it's what happened in Syria was such an utter disaster. Just one thing on this, there was a moment in 2012. I basically happened to agree with that. The other big factor here, and I think this is a factor that the devil's American foreign policy generally, but particularly in circumstances where we're dealing with civil conflict and civil strike, where internal dynamics are so complex. I mean, we didn't even understand our own country over the last couple of years, sitting in Washington, let alone understand what the heck is going on in Syria, a country which, by the way, we haven't had the depth of diplomatic or other forms of engagement have even in other Middle Eastern countries. And frankly, if you were sitting in the president's chair in 2012, you were being told by a lot of credible people, he's going down, Assad's going down. And you're sitting there thinking, well, why are we then going to come in on top of this in a certain way? And that was a misjudgment about a number of different factors. But there was a real sense out there that had a big impact, I think, on presidential decision-making that was an empirical call about the actual state of affairs by Syria at the time that matters. And that's a big factor. And if you're dealing with strategy, you've kind of got to know this predicate going in. And in the case of Syria, I think it's a bigger impact than maybe we've on. I remember that well. Even the Russians stopped that. Yeah, Ellie, I'll just follow up on your comment that it was a country that we didn't know all that well. One of the striking things to me when I was in the government was the degree to which we knew governments and not countries. We knew the guy who was going to be the new foreign minister. We had a big file on him. And we knew it before he was foreign minister. And what I say to ambassadors when they were going out sometimes was you're going to know every rich person in the country. You're going to know everybody who has his own plane. You're going to know everybody who's a candidate for the cabinet and everybody who owns a bank. Well, what's going on in the country? And it isn't so sitting in the capital and you're busy. You are busy trying to cable back to all that stuff. How do you know? I mean, there are some ways to do it. Talk to the Peace Corps volunteers. Talk to people from AID. Well, there's a lot of people, I would say, in the State Department who think that you should lend your swimming pool to the Peace Corps volunteers. Sure, I'm going to talk to these kids. What do they know? And same for AID. Who are these people? So I think it is a broad problem, even in countries where we have a very good relationship, that we don't know really what's going on. That's true all the way in the back because the back never gets the microphone. So yeah, you're right there. My name's Amy Austin Holmes. I was actually hired at the American University in Cairo in 2008 when Saad at Ibrahim was not able to return to Egypt. So I appreciate the discussion. But comparing the situation now to 2005, I mean, the withholding, I think that the case of Saad was really fascinating and that the withholding of AID did seem to have some kind of positive outcome in his case. How is it now, though? I mean, it's not just one person or a few or a handful that are being targeted by the regime, but virtually every leader of every NGO in Egypt, every oppositional figure from newspapers, hundreds of websites that are censored, et cetera. And if you have resources coming from the Gulf or elsewhere, how effective can the decision now to potentially reduce the military aid? How effective do you think that will be? And more generally, when CeCe was invited to the White House, could you maybe just comment on what was there any pushback to before the decision was made to invite him here? Because on a symbolic level, for CeCe, like in Egypt, a photo is maybe more important than $300 million. Well, I'll take a crack at that. I think we talked about rhetoric a bit ago. I think the rhetoric is very important. And the problem we have now is that the administration's rhetoric at the top does not reflect or is not reflected in the suspension and denial of aid. So it's a very confusing message. It is certainly not a clear message about a tough support or change in the way CeCe is governing. And it would be more effective if it were clearer. And I think that's always true. That is, by the way, I think the kind of programs that we do through DRL, or MEPI, or AID, or whatever are not as important as what the rulers of the country are hearing from the president and the secretary of state and that clearly defines American policy. I don't know how a guy that would have been a great deputy secretary of state had done that. I think I tweeted about it, Elliot, and that probably didn't help that. I'm sorry. Kiss of death. That's what we were on there. That's what it was. But I don't know how the decision was reached with hold aid. And sometimes a decision with hold aid is reached. I remember this in my youth, 1981, arm sales to Guatemala, because the administration has persuaded that Congress will not let you do it. So if you try to do it, you will look bad, because you're not supporting democracy and human rights, and you won't get the aid. So you also look ineffective. So why not just deny the aid, and then you look heroic and principled? That may be what happened here. I really don't know what happened inside the administration. But look, it's a lot better off with the decision having been made than the alternative of just giving what we ate. So I apologize to the gentleman in the back. We have to end precisely right now, because I have one last question. And it's related to this conversation. In earlier sessions, we talked about other external actors in the Middle East, the rise of and in earlier parts of our discussions last night, talking about Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia. A lot of actors are very engaged in the region that are not interested in defining governance the way we've been talking about it here. And at the very top, to echo what Elliot just said, it does not appear that our president is focused on that. How worried are you about this? Is it epiphenomenal? We're going to get through this period, and we're going to be engaged in pushing for these strategic objectives. Now I really am focused on the governance piece. Let's call it democracy. How about that? Or is this the beginning of the end of a period where America played a leadership role in the promotion, support, and I liked all the caveats we had earlier, or how about how you phrase it, of these values and institutions. And that we'll look back at this period as the beginning of the end of this. Maybe it started in 89, but are we at a pivotal moment, or are we just in a interregnum on this issue? Big hard question, and we only have three minutes left. Michelle, let's start with you. Well, I mean, look, I think as some of us have been discussing inside discussions, part of this has to do with a story that the United States has to sell, so to speak, about itself as a democracy and how it's worked for us, and so forth. So part of the answer to your question depends on how things work out here, and how our society and our democratic institutions handle the challenges that we're facing inside our own country right now, and also that we get our head straight about the promotion of democracy and human rights around the world being clearly in our interests, which I think it is unambiguously, but Americans have lost that sense. It's very distressing. One of the things that really needs doing, by the way, in this country, I think is a correction of the narrative about Iraq and Afghanistan and why the United States went to war there. So those things need to be fixed. I'm actually pretty confident that they will be fixed and that the United States will continue to be a major factor. But I think, look, I mean, it's very difficult. With powers like Russia and Iran, which are essentially unfriendly to the United States and to our way of life and so forth, they're going to look to take advantage of our mistakes. And they've been having a good time of that. So obviously, we have to make fewer mistakes to prevent that from happening. With others that are supposed to be friendly states, like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, et cetera, I think we have failed to take seriously enough their interventions, gutter as well. All of them in the post-2011 period intervened with money and so forth in different ways, whether we're talking Egypt, Libya, Yemen, so forth. And I just don't think the United States took it seriously enough, really engaged with them seriously enough about it and tried. I mean, you mentioned this, Jake, tried to sort of mitigate their concerns, think with them, but don't sort of look the other way while they intervened. So I think we're going to have to take that sort of stuff more seriously. Briefly. Elliot and then David think the last item of the reason to be optimistic, too. I think what we're seeing now is a reaction to the rack enough standing, the sense that we invaded those countries to establish democracy. And so concern about democracy and human rights leads us to war, endless expense, and so forth. And it's impossible. I think that we're not going to do it anymore. But of course, we want to see the Afghan undertake the political reforms that they need. So there was in that an acknowledgment, whether we intended or not, that the internal situation in these other countries matters to us. And I think people will come to realize that more and more if and when Iraq and Afghanistan stayed as American wars. Jake, last word. Make it upbeat. No, no, just make it honest. Maybe a little more nervous about where we're headed. Fundamentally, I believe in the capacity of American renewal. And I totally agree that renewal has to happen at home as well as in our power and prestige in the world. But I think what Trump has put forward as a guiding philosophy to the extent he has one is captured in the Cone McMaster op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that basically says, the US is going to be a normal country now. We are going to compete for advantage with everyone else. We don't deny the elemental state of international affairs. We embrace it. And I think that that has purchase on the left, too. And not just because of Iraq and Afghanistan, but because of a sense that the elite globalists have not been looking out for the interests of most Americans. And the only way we are going to get through this, this is a very American narcissistic answer. I mean, other countries will have a say in how this goes. They rush it. But from our side is if we are able to combine the best of nationalism with the best of internationalism without the worst of nationalism and the worst of internationalism, whether we can achieve that or not is all about leadership. It is all about whether or not you end up with a president who will lead an American people who are willing to be persuaded. For every opinion poll you can find about how America is turning inward, you can find one that says it's not, which says to me it comes down to who's sitting in the Oval Office. So if Trump wins reelection and we have eight years of this, I think that that will not linear quickly. But if we get someone who's willing to restore a sense of purpose to American foreign policy, then we have all the tools and attributes to be able to not entirely resume a position we have before because the world's changing, but remain a potent force and a positive force in the world. Well, I want to end on an optimistic note. I am optimistic about the future because people like these three are willing to serve in the government and engage with the government. A really smart, strategic panel, so I want to thank our panelists. And let me hand it over to Michelle for the final word on the entire conference. Yeah, I just want to thank all of you for being with us. Thank our partners from Stanford for what I think was really a terrific day. And I want to thank in particular two people who haven't appeared up on this stage, but who worked extremely hard to put all of this together. That's Hisham Salam from Stanford and my colleague. My colleague, John Polkeri from the Middle East program at Carnegie, from the back of the room. So thank you guys for helping us pull it off. And thanks everybody. Have a great evening.